The Authzed Pivot to Enterprise: What Happens When Engineers Try to Sell to Credit Committees

The Authzed Pivot to Enterprise: What Happens When Engineers Try to Sell to Credit Committees

Building a product is hard. Selling it to enterprises when you’ve never done sales before is harder.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jacob Moshenko, CEO and Co-founder of Authzed, shared the uncomfortable reality of transitioning from product-led growth to enterprise sales. His company had reached approximately 25 enterprise customers with an average contract value around $50,000—all without a traditional sales team. Then they tried to scale. “It’s been very painful to try to figure out what does that look like to bring on more of the sales assist type motion, especially when we haven’t historically had one,” Jake admitted.

The pain wasn’t just about hiring salespeople. It was about confronting how little a team of brilliant engineers understood about enterprise buying processes, decision-making hierarchies, and the vocabulary of business value that executives actually care about.

The Accidental Enterprise Success

Authzed’s first 25 enterprise customers came through a motion that worked beautifully—for the buyers it worked for. Engineers would discover SpiceDB through search or GitHub, download the open-source version, test it thoroughly in their environments, and eventually reach out about the commercial offering. The sales process was consultative, technical, and driven entirely by the engineering champion.

This bottom-up motion succeeded because it matched how technical buyers evaluate infrastructure. Engineers want to validate solutions themselves before involving procurement. They prefer GitHub repositories to sales decks. They trust working code more than marketing promises. Jake and his technical team spoke this language fluently because they were these buyers.

But this motion had natural limits. It worked for companies where engineering teams had budget authority or could easily secure approval for infrastructure purchases. It worked when the economic buyer—the person who signs the contract—was close enough to the technical evaluation to trust the engineering team’s recommendation. It stopped working when deals required navigating credit committees, multi-stakeholder approval processes, and CFO scrutiny.

The Credit Committee Reality

The breaking point came when Authzed started pursuing larger enterprise opportunities. A staff engineer at a Fortune 500 company might spend months evaluating SpiceDB and conclude it’s the perfect solution. But getting a $100,000 contract through procurement at a large enterprise requires navigating an entirely different gauntlet.

Credit committees don’t care about elegant APIs or sophisticated graph-based relationship modeling. They care about vendor financial stability, data security certifications, contractual liability terms, and ROI calculations in their preferred format. The engineering champion who loves SpiceDB suddenly needs to translate technical benefits into business outcomes for stakeholders who’ve never written a line of code.

Jake and his team discovered they were unprepared for this translation layer. “We are all engineers. Nobody on the team actually has done this before,” he explained. They could explain authorization architecture to senior staff engineers for hours. They struggled to articulate business value to CFOs in ten minutes.

The gap wasn’t just about communication—it was about understanding what enterprise buyers actually evaluate. Engineers think about technical superiority, architectural elegance, and long-term maintainability. Procurement teams think about vendor risk, contract flexibility, and comparable pricing. These aren’t wrong criteria; they’re just different criteria requiring different responses.

The Sales Hire

Recognizing this gap, Authzed brought on their first experienced enterprise salesperson. On paper, this solved the problem: someone who understood enterprise sales processes could navigate the credit committees, speak the language of business value, and close larger deals. In practice, the integration created new tensions.

The salesperson knew how to sell enterprise software but needed to learn authorization infrastructure deeply enough to engage credibly with technical buyers. The engineering team knew authorization inside out but struggled to support sales processes they’d never experienced. Different vocabularies, different priorities, and different definitions of success created friction.

Jake described the learning curve as painful not because anyone was incompetent but because the company was learning an entirely new muscle. Product-led growth companies develop strong product and engineering cultures. Adding enterprise sales requires developing an equally strong sales culture without losing what made the product motion work.

The challenge intensified because Authzed couldn’t abandon their product-led motion—it remained their most efficient customer acquisition channel. They needed to layer enterprise sales on top without breaking what already worked. This meant maintaining two parallel motions with different processes, different stakeholder engagement models, and different metrics for success.

The Positioning Problem

Enterprise sales exposed another challenge: Authzed’s positioning optimized for technical buyers, not business buyers. Jake had deliberately kept the product complex and technically sophisticated because “I actually fundamentally disagree with that advice for what we’re building. The problem that we’re solving is one of the hardest problems in infrastructure.”

This positioning resonated perfectly with staff engineers who’d rebuilt authorization systems twice. It resonated poorly with VPs of Engineering who needed to justify the purchase to CFOs. The complexity that signaled competence to technical buyers signaled risk to business buyers. The refusal to simplify suggested either arrogance or lack of market understanding to executives unfamiliar with infrastructure trade-offs.

Authzed faced a dilemma: water down the positioning to make enterprise sales easier, or maintain technical credibility while finding new ways to communicate business value. They chose the latter, but executing it proved difficult. How do you explain that product complexity is actually a feature when the buyer’s entire experience of vendors has been that simpler is better?

The answer involved developing new collateral, new proof points, and new reference stories. Instead of leading with technical architecture, they led with the cost of engineering teams rebuilding authorization systems every three to four years. Instead of explaining graph-based relationship models, they quantified the time-to-market impact of not having flexible permissions infrastructure.

The Process Gap

Product-led growth companies operate with minimal process. Engineers download software, test it, and adopt it without formal procurement. This works beautifully until you need vendor security questionnaires, SOC 2 compliance documentation, and master service agreements reviewed by legal teams.

Authzed discovered they lacked the infrastructure for enterprise sales. Their contracts were simple because they’d never needed complexity. Their security documentation existed but wasn’t packaged for procurement teams. Their customer references were willing to talk to peers but hadn’t been prepped for formal reference calls. Every enterprise deal revealed another process gap.

Building this infrastructure consumed resources Jake hadn’t budgeted for. They needed legal support to develop enterprise-ready contracts. They needed to invest in compliance certifications that mid-market customers never requested. They needed to formalize customer success processes that had been informal and relationship-based. Each addition was necessary but distracted from product development.

The timing created tension. Authzed’s engineering team wanted to build features that would make SpiceDB better for technical users—the core audience that drove growth. The sales team needed enterprise features, compliance documentation, and contractual flexibility to close deals. Both were right. The company wasn’t yet large enough to do both well.

The Cultural Collision

Perhaps the deepest challenge was cultural. Authzed had built an engineering-first culture where technical excellence was the primary value. Decisions prioritized architectural integrity, performance, and developer experience. Adding enterprise sales meant incorporating a culture that prioritized business outcomes, revenue growth, and market positioning.

These cultures don’t naturally align. Engineers view sales skeptically—worried that revenue pressure will drive product compromises. Sales teams view engineering skeptically—worried that perfectionism will slow deal velocity. Both stereotypes contain truth, and managing the tension requires deliberate cultural integration that technical founders rarely have experience leading.

Jake navigated this by being transparent about the learning process. Rather than pretending to know how enterprise sales worked, he acknowledged the team was figuring it out together. This honesty helped but didn’t eliminate the friction. The engineering team still struggled when sales commitments required accelerating feature timelines. The sales team still struggled when engineering priorities delayed enterprise features.

The Measured Path Forward

Rather than trying to build a massive enterprise sales organization overnight, Authzed adopted a measured approach. “I think by the end of this year, we’ll get to about thirty people total,” Jake shared, describing deliberate headcount growth focused on sustainable scaling rather than aggressive expansion.

This patience reflected lessons learned. Hiring too many salespeople before the enterprise motion was proven would have created chaos. Better to scale slowly, learn the new muscle, and expand only when the playbook worked consistently. The product-led motion continued generating steady growth while they figured out enterprise.

The retention metrics validated this cautious approach. “The churn in the people we actually sell to is pretty much zero,” Jake noted. Whether customers came through product-led growth or enterprise sales, they stayed. This low churn bought Authzed time to figure out enterprise scaling without the pressure of backfilling lost revenue.

The Technical Founder’s Dilemma

Jake’s experience represents a common pattern for technical founders. You build something genuinely sophisticated that solves hard problems. Technical buyers love it. You grow through product-led motion. Then you hit the enterprise wall where buying processes, stakeholder complexity, and business value translation become as important as product quality.

The transition requires learning an entirely new skill set while maintaining what made you successful initially. It’s uncomfortable, it’s slow, and there’s no shortcut. You can hire experienced people to help, but they can’t do it for you—you still need to integrate enterprise sales into your company’s DNA without losing your engineering soul.

For Authzed, the journey continues. Twenty-five enterprise customers proved the model works. Scaling to 250 requires mastering enterprise sales while staying true to the technical depth that makes the product valuable. It’s painful, but Jake’s building through it—one credit committee presentation at a time.